Luis David Yanez comments

For a little bit of context here, which I think is needed.

Sapporo had an elongated Winter with snow storms deep into March.

Temperatures didn't raised as usual, which kept Sapporo with a good amount of snow in April, which is rare.

"The temperature in Sapporo hit 26 degrees... and is still rising"

There is no way in hell this Frankenstein of a regulation is going to have any meaningful impact.

The main barrier of entry has never been the Class 2 License, but the business permit side, but this new regulation only takes away the necessity of a Class 2 License, while making it even more of a hassle than just becoming a self employed taxi driver in the regulatory side.

Not only that, but this regulation was only created with the idea that "if there are not enough taxi drivers, then other non-taxi drivers will do the job", but for a time-part job that pay not that much it is way too much of a hassle.

I mean, you need a month of training before you can even do the part time job, and it doesn't allow you to keep any other full time job.

This regulation is a pipe dream created by the taxi industry, and promoted by the government as a way to say "see, we also have ride sharing!"

Was there an eclipse in Japan?

Translation:

"I don't want to abuse my power in order to make people act the way I want them to, but I will be forced to become an authoritarian despot if people will not listen to me."

Making a whole article that makes it seem like something happened, when the only thing that happened is that water from a pool spilled outside of its container because of the movement of the earthquake, which is basically nothing, is one of the reasons why people are so scared by this stuff.

The anti-nuclear lobby uses ANY event of anything to make it seem like the nuclear industry is extremely unsafe, when the contrary can be easily proven with facts.

If you care about climate change at all, you cannot be anti-nuclear, specially here in Japan, because nuclear energy has been replaced, and continues to be replaced every day the reactors do not restart, with fossil fuels.

Japan had planned to phase out nuclear power after the March 2011 tsunami and Fukushima meltdown

This sentence is just false. There has never been a proper plan to do anything, and everything has stayed in this limbo in which the regulatory board on nuclear safety became extremely strict, making it almost imposible to restart any of the plants, basically just wasting everyone's time and money into the effort to "restart" the plants while not really being able to do it.

Overstating the risk of a Tsunami is NEVER a good thing.

One reason why people who could have run and take shelter back in 2011 is because they believed nothing was going to happen, because hysteric tsunami alarms and evacuation notices occurred all the time, even when absolutely nothing happened.

So, when there is a Tsunami advisory, after so many decades of Tsunami advisories, alerts and alarms that ended up in absolutely nothing, a lot of people just ignored it as they always do, because in their view, chances are this is the same as all those other times.

The really strong messaging on Tsunamis should be reserved for very dangerous situations.

It has been just about a decade since 2011, and chances are that it is going to take about 100 years to have something of that magnitude.

Right now people might be more sensible to that kind of rhetoric, because the images of 2011 are still fresh in the mind of some, but by the time the next big one comes, that memory would be long gone, and the hysteric announcement of every little tsunami there is becomes just "part of life", and therefore at that moment in time, when people SHOULD really be afraid of a Tsunami, they won't be, and the story repeats itself once again.

The media and government organizations, really have very bad judgment when it comes with risk management. In their view "it is better to be safe than sorry", without taking into account the long term consequences of their actions, and how their could become completely the oposite to what they want.

Everything gets called "far-right" now-a-days if it isn't centrist or left.

Javier Milei, the new Argentinian president, which I agree with in many aspects, also got called far-right, even when his policies are extremely different to those of Geert Wilders, which I mostly disagree with, not to mention that Milei as a hard-core libertarian isn't even really part of the left-right spectrum.

It is also pretty tiering that people who aren't centrists or leftist are called "The Trump of X".

Looking at the Wiki page of the party of Geert Wilders, it seems that the party is populist, pandering to the left and right where it is convenient, so just calling it a "far-right" is not just wrong, but it really doesn't accurately portraits their party.

To be honest, all this inaccurate name-calling reeks of media bias, and if anything that name-calling is part of why there seems to be a swing against the left in politics.

Wealth inequality continues to expand worldwide. The rich are getting richer and richer. If "socialism" were really as rampant as you claim, this wouldn't be happening.

If anything, I would argue that far left socialist economic policies end up with exactly that result.

Corruption and cronyism are a staple of heavy regulated economic models.

Monopolies become pretty much inevitable as regulations usually do not allow newer players to enter the field.

Be careful of what this actually means.

Part of this "Undeclared wealth" is by people who DO NOT LIVE IN JAPAN.

Japan has always tried to claim that Japanese nationals should pay taxes in Japan, even if they do not live in Japan, if they have "a house" or something along those lines in the country, or in the case of inheritance or "gifts", they claim to have an absolute right to Inheritance or Gifts tax right if that Japanese national has been living "constantly" outside of Japan for less than 10 years, which once again, Japan claim it doesn't even count because if they have a house or something like that in Japan they claim that they are not really "outside of Japan".

It's wonderful what war propaganda can do.

On the one side, you have the Pro Ukraine people that claim this is never going to stop until Russia, and specially Putin are put behind bars, which is extremely unlikely and no realistic at all.

On the other side, you have Pro Russian people that believe Russia was justified invading another country, and see Putin as some sort of super man.

There is very little to no pragmatism or nuance to be found in this comment section.

My real concern is that, as long as this us vs them mentality continues, this is going to be yet another never ending proxy war.

This is said to be for to avoid "sexual predators" working with children, as a way to create an easy emotional reaction on people so that people support this, but this is mostly just going to be a disaster, in which this is mostly going to be used against people with non sex related minor misdemeanors.

And that's on top of the usual discrimination there already exists in this regard. I remember a couple of years back that in a company I used to work for I knew of a very good candidate for engineer getting rejected because my boss found out that this guy APPEARED at a court at some time in the past.

He didn't even knew why he appeared at the court, or what was this about, but instead of looking up, or even asking about it, he decided that this was "enough of a risk" and just ought right rejected his application, even though he was a great fit.

They should declare an state of emergency and stop all activity in Shibuya, close all businesses, all stations and everything until the end of the year, in order to prevent this event, which is the most important thing ever.

Nope is not idiological...is because Halloween in Shibuya there is no organizer.

Most of the events like the Awa Odori Festival are organized by the government.

If the Government wanted, they could do it, and waste the same kind of money they are wasting on preventing it, but they prefer to just try to prevent it.

It's the same story every single year, Shibuya puts barriers, police cars everywhere and things like that to "stop" people from "disrupting" the Shibuya Crossing, by disrupting the Shibuya Crossing while not allowing people to just make a simple celebration.

It would actually go better if they just accepted the reality that this is going to happen, and it doesn't matter how much they try to force people into not wanting to party, it is still going to happen, and instead of wasting all of these resources into this campaign using it so that they can try to make it as safe and organized as posible.

Japan has a lot of events with a lot of people in the streets all over the place, so the only reason they are going so against this one is mostly ideological.

These subsidies are dumb, because they are subsidizing a price which about half of it is just taxes.

They should just take away some of the double taxation or reduce taxes in gasoline, but then they cannot claim they are "subsidizing" taxes and get more from the budget into the black hole of national finances.

To Japanese living abroad - just get your citizenship and don't tell anyone about. I know several in the UK who've done this. It makes their lives abroad much simpler.

100% this.

The people who created this lawsuit also knew about this, but wanted to end this "don't ask, don't tell" situation, in which the "most honest" people end up paying the price for being honest, and they end up loosing their Japanese Nationality, but once again Japan has shown how meaningless laws that are for posturing nationalism while also quietly allowing people to have dual citizenship anyway as long as they keep their mouth shut is the way of the law in Japan.

This article is complete misinformation, but the same bad information has spread like a wild fire all over the place.

It is taking out of context what Elon actually said, in which he said the reason he was giving preference to Premium subscribers and making that a monthly payment was to combat bots, then he went on to say he was thinking about adding a lower price tier.

He never said anything about charging everyone for using the platform.

You can see the interview yourself at https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/1703806204894498966

who pay it?

Usually no one, that's the whole point.

The benefits are tax deductions. So in other words, they had to pay more in taxes just for being gay.

The constitution of Japan clearly stipulates that marriage “shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes.” A prefectural government, however progressive its governor may be, cannot create a law, let alone one that overrides the supreme law.

Again this one. That part of the constitution is meant to mean that both sexes have equality over the law, it was never meant to be a denial of same sex couples.

Not only that, there have already been multiple rulings that say that the current civil code for not giving equal rights to gay people is in violation of the constitution which you called "the supreme law".

And not even that, this case was about 事実婚, which is not codified marriage. In these cases, it is 100% open to interpretation of what actually constitutes 事実婚, and there are already many precedent cases in which 2 same sex people are recognized as been in 事実婚, so if the court didn't recognized it as such, is just because the court didn't want to interpret it that way.

Yet another drug targeting amyloid beta, so I don't expect much.

It has been sad and frustrating that it has been a while now since the bombshell report in the Science magazine that the study that made the amyloid beta the main target for anti Alzheimer's appears to have made up data, which will explain why even though over the last decades there have been a lot of drugs targeting amyloid beta, none of them seem to have any significant impact in the disease, and even after the report there have been multiple announcements of "a new Alzheimer drug", all of which target amyloid beta.

Intelligent enough to do Hacking, stupid enough to be afraid of normal levels of radiation.

The only thing I have to say about this is, anyone who is in the hysterical side of "we are doomed" or "it is the fault of X or Y", but you have been against nuclear power, you are really not in a position to preach to anyone.

If nuclear power had been developed as it should in all the years after the Chernobyl accident, we would be in a very different place right now in terms of our dependence of fossil fuels.

The irrational anti nuclear hysterics are at it again.

These people obviously understand nothing about radiation or nuclear power, are probably illiterate in all scientific subjects, but somehow they trust their irrational fears that have basis on the depiction of radiation by the likes of Godzilla or The Simpsons more than the international nuclear power watchdog.

Also it becomes a great pretext to once again rally people against Japan, so there is also that.

It is sad and laughable that even though it has been proven time and time again that economic sanctions as a way to stop some country of doing something or to try to do a regime change never ever work at all (I mean, Cuba, Iran, North Korea...), people continue to support them, even if they have bad consequences for the lives of every day people, and even themselves.

This article and comment section is a sad reminder of how little people actually understand, or even care to understand radiation, nuclear contamination or any topics around nuclear power.

"Estimating how many people have suffered health effects from these tests is notoriously difficult."

Because, unless you were directly affected by the initial radiation blast, giving you radiation poisoning, or some other illness very easily linked to it, all other type of radiation will conform to what is generally known as the "Background radiation" of earth, and it's very difficult to pinpoint the source of the single gama particle that caused your colon cancer as either part of one of the gama particles from the radioactive particles created after a nuclear test, or natural background radiation from the uranium rich soil of your back yard, or from a supernova that exploded billons of lights years away.

That's why you usually use statistics to compare rates with a baseline, and if the baseline hasn't moved that much, then the effects are seen as negligible.

Still, some people do not like this scientific way of doing things and continue to claim that all of the cancer from some specific area that was near a nuclear site or something like that is because of the test, without any evidence, but still claim it, and then articles like these make it seem like the scientific consensus and the anti-nuclear guy that made a bad statistic to say radiation is killing people are just as valid, make it "controversial", and therefore people continue to have an exaggerated perception of radiation risk.

There is non radioactive contamination that is as bad or worse for humans, that is also invisible, that has left places in France completely uninhabited and with restrictions (google "zone rouge"), and that even though you cannot actually measure as easy as radiation, making it even more "invisible" and dangerous than radioactive contamination, people do not care as much as they do about radiation, because of the constant anti-nuclear propaganda.

The more real threat to Japan is China, not North Korea.

The only reason North Korea is able to continue with their insane missile program in North Korea is because China continues to support them.

The moment China stops their support, the North Korea regime is done for.

But thinking of North Korea as serious is, to be honest, quite funny. I mean, even the way this is redacted it says "North Korea threat more serious than ever", which if the threat has never actually been that serious, being more serious than ever is completely meaningless.

North Korea is flexing, and using those flexes to try to negotiate sending them more money and making more concessions, as always.

Even if the threat is real, this sounds mostly as government propaganda to get people anxious about the threat of North Korea, and get more money, and making people not feel so bad when they inevitably rise taxes again.

I remember the summer of 2005 in Japan. One day while in Akihabara I felt like I was dying, and when I saw the public thermometer it said 40°.

Never felt anything like that again.

In Sapporo this summer has actually been mild.

It depends a lot in the location, amd tbh, the global change in temperature is about 1 degree since 1900, so most people shouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Though, cities have gotten way hotter than the average global because of urbanization, including more and more asphalt, less green areas and excess use of air conditioner systems.

Once again, Japan cannot and will not be part of NATO because Japan doesn't have an army as such, and the constitution prohibits Japan from having a proper army, and no, the JSDF doesn't count as an actual army, since they are heavily restricted as to what actually they can do.

Not to mention that the US is under obligation to protect Japan if anything where going to happen, and there are lots of US military bases in Japan, making Japan basically a country implicitly protected by NATO without being an actual member.

Infections are still rising in the Middle east, North Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, so flying pigs still posible by 2035.

They are reaching.

The only reason why there was an non-equal visa policy was because China did so in order to push Japanese investors and tourists to visit the country for business or leisure.

So they unilaterally allowed Japanese citizens to go Visa-free, unilaterally stopped that as a way to push for Japan to remove their Covid-restrictions on China, and unilaterally now are asking for extra things to Japan to return to a Visa-Free status.

Japan doesn't trust that people from China will not overstay their visit, and there are good reasons for it.

I mean, after looking at what the Chinese government did last year, I wouldn't be surprised if people just tried to run away and never return again.

Honestly, going to China is not a priority for anyone in Japan, and the people who need to go to china will be getting a Visa anyway, so once again, this will go nowhere, but it just shows how arrogant China has become.